Review: Next, by Michael Crichton

THERE are few appealing characters in Next, the latest techno-thriller from Michael Crichton, but readers will warm to Dave, the "humanzee" product of an illicit transgenic experiment. Smuggled from a primate research facility by his human "father", Dave loves his new family. The suburbs of southern California are, however, no place for a boy who is part-human, part-chimp - especially one whose response to a school bully is to climb a fence and throw excrement.

Like Dave, Next is an uncomfortable hybrid. In this assault on the commercialisation of biomedicine, Crichton takes some liberties in blending fact and fantasy. Lightly fictionalised accounts of genuine controversies are interspersed with mock news reports, some describing real people and events. Yet with improbable transgenic protagonists like Dave and Gerard - essentially a precocious child trapped in a parrot's body - there should be no mistaking this novel for a work of docu-fiction.

If ...

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